“Of all sad words of tongue or pen,” sang the poet, “the saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’” Not so. It is the vain might-have-been that gives birth to the bright shall-be!
“Our ancestors who migrated hither were laborers,” wrote Jefferson. And again: “My new trade of nail-making is to me in this country what an additional title of nobility is or the ensigns of a new order are in Europe.” The dignity of labor, the prizes to the laborer--these ideals of a century ago, ideals born no doubt of a vanity which sought to make a virtue of necessity, are still our ideals. But, where in Jefferson’s day his broad and sympathetic mind was almost alone in the belief in the loftier basis for the ideal, to-day millions of us see that the laborer is the only good citizen, that his estate is the only estate of dignity. No people ever had such a conception of work as we have to-day. It is an evolution under Democracy. No previous nation could have understood it; our ancestors did not have it, for they were still influenced by caste ideas, hard and nobly though they strove to outgrow them. There are vestiges of the old ideas concerning work remaining. The class that does not work and the class that emulates it and envies it still look down on work, still hug the vulgar, ignorant fancy that work is a curse. But that is not important. Once more let us remind ourselves that caste is made not by him who looks down but by him who looks up. The vital fact is that the laborer is himself aware of his own sovereign dignity. And, excepting a few black sheep, the American flock still bears the ancestral markings; this is a nation of laborers. And the markings of which our ancestors tried hard, but with dubious success, not to be ashamed, have become the markings of honor--not to an occasional Jefferson, but to the overwhelming mass of our eighty millions.
This concept of labor is the first-fruit of Democracy and Enlightenment.
When sons of men of vast wealth go to work, there is much excitement among the idlers, rich and poor. The agitation shows how hard dies the theory that work is wholly a curse and, to a great extent, a degradation; that the only sensible, or noble even, ideal of life is to idle about; that there must be something of the freak in a human being who labors when he might sit at his ease amusing himself by counting the drops of sweat as they roll from the brows of his toiling fellow-men.